Tomorrow morning, seven months after a Manhattan jury convicted private citizen Donald Trump of 34 felonies, he should be sentenced. The U.S. Supreme Court has no cause to delay or cancel the proceedings before Acting Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, despite the president-elect’s last-ditch appeal.
Trump has asked Merchan and the Manhattan appellate court to stop the sentencing and they declined. He’s now banking on the justices, who’ve already done so much for him with a sweeping immunity ruling that undermined both this and the federal cases against him.
Courts and legal observers have raised understandable qualms about the prospect of state-level judges and prosecutors having the power to hold criminal proceedings against presidents, proceedings that could interfere with official duties and amount to separation-of-powers meddling against the presidency itself. But Trump is not president now. And there is no immunity for president-elects.
Trump was a private citizen when he committed the offenses in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He was a private citizen when this prosecution began and when he was convicted and remains a private citizen as of now, for another week and a half.
The acts that he stands convicted of — acts that happened prior to his first election and which had nothing to do with any official duties — are extensively documented and were presented in exhaustive detail to a jury that was carefully selected to include a real cross section of Manhattanites. These citizens of Trump’s own home city found, unanimously and beyond any reasonable doubt, that the soon-to-be-president had falsified business records and obscured the campaign-related expense of paying off a porn actress to keep quiet about an affair.
Trump has evaded real consequences for his conduct, not just in this case but in the federal election interference and classified documents cases against him, which have now been dismissed in the aftermath of his second election. Merchan has already said that he expects Trump to receive a sentence of unconditional discharge, meaning that the felon will not be forced to even pay a fine.
Nothing would be overhanging his presidency; the case would be over without any remaining conditions on him. This is fair enough for a defendant convicted of first-time nonviolent felonies, and we’ve said as much throughout this whole process. And once that sentence is entered, Trump could appeal the conviction.
Trump’s maneuvering to try to get even a sentence of nothing tossed out — or stayed and then tossed out by the courts during his presidency, which could well happened under the Supreme Court’s over-broad determination of presidential immunity — isn’t even about dodging specific consequences but avoiding the well-earned label of convicted felon. Trump wants the courts to say that he did nothing wrong, and the history books to say that he was no criminal.
There’s no reason the man should get even that after he’s managed to worm out of all other avenues for criminal accountability. To grant him this would be to finally say, at long last, that he is and always was untouchable by the systems of justice that we have been told since grade school constrain all Americans in equal ways. Today, District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office will respond to Trump’s high court appeal. Tomorrow, Trump should be sentenced, and he should have to live with it.